Hubris: Awesome until you get chained to a rock.

The belief you are greater than God is hubris.

Depending on what your opinion of God is, it requires a certain suspension of reality to believe you are greater than (a) God. If you are speaking of the only God I know, and the definition of whom I shall soon share, I would say being greater than him is one of the very few things in this universe that is completely impossible.

God to me possesses apart from countless others, these key characteristics:

Omnipotence: Power over all that has or will exists. Nothing is beyond God's change.

Omniscience: Knowledge of all that has or will exist. Nothing is beyond the knowing of God.

Omnipresence: To be in all places and times at once. There is no place God is not.

Omnibenevolence: To be completely good. All that God does or every will is 'Good' morally, whatever that means. This last is a not held to be true by many people who nonetheless believe that all the pervious are true of God, explaining why a God that can do, knows, and is everywhere would allow apparently bad things to occur. In fact spell check sees only it among these words as an error. I assure you it is a word.

I think you will agree, it is fairly impossible for any human being to have these qualities, and to believe he or she possesses all these qualities is quite mad. But, to some the word 'God' has a different meaning.

For example, the norse God Thor (for whom our day Thursday is named) Is certainly lacking all these qualities. The Nordic peoples believed that he was very powerful but could not do certain things, that he knew only a very large number of things, that he was only ever in one place at any one time, and that he sometimes performed actions that were 'Bad'.

Clearly limited, but undoubtably powerful, Thor had power over storms, particularly thunder (for which he is named) and lightening. I speak in past tense, but there are some people who still believe that the God Thor exists. He doesn't. Never did. People are dumb.

 Any-who, back on topic, to believe you are greater in any of these aspects than Thor would be did he exist, requires only a ridiculously huge suspension of belief in yourself, rather than an impossibly large one. But if Thor is a God, what of weaker beings, like Loki, also of the Norse pantheon of Gods, or some other weaker but powerful being. Still Gods to us, yes indeed.

But depending on who thinks what is God, almost anything has potential for Good-hood. To a garden-worm, am I not a God? I can take or spare its life with ease, it can cause me at most, on its own or accompanied, irritation.

Believing you are greater than me is quite easy to do, in fact at some times it is both practical and realistic. But only if you also think I am a God over worms could this possibly be considered hubris.

Hubris is then a relative action, but pomposity and over-evaluation of self are still damn annoying. You won't get chained to a rock for thinking you're better than me, but then, I am a pretty rubbish God. If a worm somehow thought it was better than me, I wouldn't punish it. I'd probably clap for it. I didn't even know they could think.



 ... Just a thought I had.